Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

If you live life in terror of your symptoms returning (or not abating), you are living half a life. I don’t know anything worse than living in fear, whether from flashbacks courtesy of PTSD or worries that you’ll never be “well.” Here’s where I explain something: I don’t believe that mental illness is curable. People may disagree, but I believe in remission instead of recovery. This view has the distinct advantage of setting oneself up for success; hoping and/or working towards a full recovery sets us up to fail.

So, what do I mean by waiting for the other shoe to drop? I’ll use myself as an example: when I am doing better, I Live in fear of things going downhill. I don’t let myself enjoy the upswing. Rather, I walk on eggshells, unsure when things may go south. I spend my time agonizing over the tiniest sign that I am sliding down that slippery slope that marks the gateway to the world of misery that defines mental illness.

Am I still as hard on myself as I used to be? NO. But I still live with a sense of inadequacy, a sense of not being in control, that goes along with mental illness. I often feel less than and at the mercy of the Beast that is mental illness. It tries to get us to believe we are unworthy of so many things, from love to mental health. Yes – far too many feel like they don’t deserve even the most rudimentary things. Why do you ask? Because people with mental illnesses, from depression to schizophrenia, often believe they did something to deserve their mental illness.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop, as I routinely do, means that I explain away my successes so as not to feel hurt when things don’t go my way. In turn, this means that, when I am met with success, I do my best to say it wasn’t all that great, that I didn’t do that well, for fear that, as the saying goes, “what goes up must come down.” I also feel like the coming down will hurt less if I don’t give an achievement its proper due. I don’t believe that I am worthy of my achievements – in fact, I try not to regard them as accomplishments at all. Believing that I am worthy of success means that if I rest on my laurels, the next time (which, I believe, will end badly), I will get hurt even more exponentially than usual.

This concept, which I have dubbed “preemptive failure,” has been studied extensively by Brene Brown, Ph.D.; she refers to the idea of waiting for the other shoe to drop as “foreboding joy.” The words seem to contradict one another, an oxymoron, as it were. (I like her terminology more than mine – it captures the essence of the predicament that we who are perfectionists at doubting ourselves find ourselves ensnared in).

Brown talks about how people who experience foreboding joy live in fear of the vulnerability that success makes us feel. In my estimation, it happens to practically all of us to some extent – it is the rare one among us who feels immune from the worry that success will be followed by a fall. It’s how we look at the future with anything but rose-colored glasses.

I would like to weigh in on this, as it is part of the fabric of my life. Occasionally (read: not often), I will experience something resembling joy. My next, very much default move is to taint the experience of joy with the belief that I do not deserve happiness. In truth, I am used to the default state of depression. It has its claws embedded in me. Expecting mediocrity has become a “safe” place for me to reside. However, I cognitively recognize that my lows are lows, regardless of my highs, and that I am not really mitigating my chance (or reality) of failure. Rather, I am swimming upstream in a cloud of depression resulting from half-assed attempts at staving off bad things coupled with not giving the good things their rightful place.

So, the logical next question is, how do I stop myself from getting ensnared in the foreboding joy roller coaster? I would suggest that you take baby steps. Don’t challenge your “Negative Nancy” all at once – that is a sure harbinger of failure. Instead, try asking yourself the following suggestions:

1. Identify the success that has you experiencing foreboding joy;

2. Describe your success as a neutral event;

3. Give yourself permission to feel fear of imminent failure (you’re going to fear it regardless of whether you “allow” it to exist);

4. Ask yourself what the best part of your success is, again in neutral terms;

5. Ask yourself what you fear most. (Is it a fear of public failure? Is it a fear that your inner critic will tell you that you don’t measure up?)

6. Ask yourself what the worst outcome could be if you indeed did fail. (And then challenge how realistic that outcome is.)

7. And, we need to ask ourselves, Exactly What Evidence do we have of our shortcomings? (This may make you uncomfortable, as 9 times out of 10, it’s more than likely that we don’t have the shortcomings we believe ourselves to have, and this challenges the “safety” our self-sabotage provides us).

So, where does the Beast come from in this blog post? The Beast loves little more than when it doesn’t have to do any work to set off a suicidal spiral. And, when it comes to self-doubt, we practically hand our fear to it on a silver platter. The Beast sits back in its chair and grins when we ignore our accomplishments. Our fear of failure means the Beast has little work to do; we’ve already tortured ourselves all by our lonesome.

Failure can be devastating; it should simply be a reminder that we’re human because humans are flawed by nature. This means that you – and, believe it or not, the Joneses, too, fail.) The trick is to regard our failures – big and small -- as learning opportunities. You should note that failure can be a place of growth if you allow it. You have the choice to sink or swim, and I’d argue that you’re almost assuredly a better swimmer than you realize. We must remember to do our best to always believe in ourselves. The reality, kids: NOBODY is immune to failure, not you, not me.